# New Discovery About Fructose Could Lead To Treatments For Cancer, Obesity And Diabetes **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 19, 2015, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143 "2015-10-19T15:28:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Robert163](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/4af34b/32.png) [@Robert163](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robert163)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/1 "2015-10-19T15:28:28Z")
New Discovery About Fructose Could Lead To Treatments For Cancer, Obesity And Diabetes. From [article](http://www.thelatestnews.com/sugar-clues-for-obesity-action/). I’m actually too tired to read it. I thought some people here might like to read it. I usually do not repost from Reddit to here but this looked interesting. Here are the [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3pcew3/scientists_have_discovered_how_fructose_is/) comments. (If I am breaking the rules with that I apologize, if a mod wants to take the Reddit link out OK, it has some good comments is all). Basically I’m too tired too read/comprehend the article but it looks interesting… (even if I wasn’t tired I couldn’t understand it but I’m sure other people here can explain it all)… I love hearing what you guys have to say about science. (Actually, sorry to go on and… the article is not that hard to understand, but, the advanced comments on Reddit are hard for me to follow). ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/2 "2015-10-19T15:32:55Z")
Once it reaches actual human trials, revive the thread. Otherwise, it’s just the usual click-bait reporting. Reported for forum change. ---
**Author:** ![Robert163](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/4af34b/32.png) [@Robert163](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robert163)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/3 "2015-10-19T15:34:55Z")
> [@running\_coach](#): > > Once it reaches actual human trials, revive the thread. Otherwise, it’s just the usual click-bait reporting. > > Reported for forum change. Oh, ok, thanks Running Coach… ---
**Author:** ![engineer\_comp\_geek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/engineer_comp_geek/32/504_2.png) [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/4 "2015-10-19T15:40:28Z")
**Moderator Action** Since at this point this is mostly speculation and opinion, let’s move this to IMHO. Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/5 "2015-10-19T17:15:17Z")
The article is so poorly written that it strains credibility. ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/6 "2015-10-19T17:23:22Z")
> [@panache45](#): > > The article is so poorly written that it strains credibility. _Strains?_ Credibility has been put in a blender then poured down the garbage disposal. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/7 "2015-10-19T17:57:18Z")
> [@running\_coach](#): > > _Strains?_ Credibility has been put in a blender then poured down the garbage disposal. +1 I get this shit all the time. If I were a mod, I would close this. ---
**Author:** ![Washoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ecae2f/32.png) [@Washoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Washoe)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/8 "2015-10-19T20:39:23Z")
I don’t see why it strains credibility. It just doesn’t convey very much information, is all. The moral of the story is probably just to limit your fructose consumption. I’ve been doing that for about 30 years. Linus Pauling recommended in the mid-1980s that humans should limit their fructose consumption to no more than eight grams/day. (OK, please—let’s not have everybody screaming all at once with the Pauling bashing. He’s still considered to be the greatest chemist of the 20th century, and after Einstein, the second-greatest scientist.) I personally find that difficult to do, so I limit my consumption to no more than 24 grams/day, and no more than 8 grams at any one meal. ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/9 "2015-10-19T20:43:07Z")
> [@Washoe](#): > > I don’t see why it strains credibility. It just doesn’t convey very much information, is all. Because it’s so insanely far away from being even a possible treatment that the only reason for the articles is to draw pageviews. ---
**Author:** ![Washoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ecae2f/32.png) [@Washoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Washoe)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/10 "2015-10-19T20:50:10Z")
Yeah, I’ll have to give you that one. Simply discovering the internal mechanism of a cellular pathway doesn’t necessarily mean that you can design a means of molecular interference with that pathway, nor does it even demonstrate that understanding that mechanism even has any clinical significance. ---
**Author:** ![Rigamarole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@Rigamarole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rigamarole)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/11 "2015-10-19T20:51:34Z")
When the OP kept going on about how he was too tired to actually bother reading the article he was posting but hoped others would explain it to him, I thought it was going to be some really long, in-depth technical piece. Article length: 6 paragraphs, 235 words in total. Approximately 2nd-grade reading level. That sure is some heavy stuff. No wonder the OP was too tired to read it. ---
**Author:** ![lazybratsche](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ba8739/32.png) [@lazybratsche](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lazybratsche)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/12 "2015-10-19T20:52:32Z")
The story in a nutshell, from the researchers own ([unfortunately paywalled](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v526/n7573/full/nature14909.html)) words: > [@](#): > > Therefore, we conclude that transport in GLUT5 is not only controlled by the rocker-switch-type movement of the N- and C-terminal TM bundles, but also by a gated-pore mechanism, in the form of local, gating movements by TM7 and TM10 in the C-terminal TM bundle that are coupled to substrate binding and release (Fig. 5 and Supplementary Videos 1, 2). TM10 is also part of the inter-TM bundle salt-bridge network, indicating how local gating and global rocker-switch-type movements are coupled. It’s a paper describing all the gory details of the structure of the protein that transports fructose into cells. That’s some hot-shit structural biology, being published in Nature and all, but there’s nothing in there discovering the pill to cure all diabetes everywhere. Nor anything about the effects of dietary fructose, causes of type II diabetes, pathology of breast cancer, or anything else the author of the OP’s article cares to copypasta. Structural papers like this could possibly be the basis for future work developing small molecule inhibitors that almost certainly aren’t going to be an effective treatment for any patient. Given typical success rates in pharmaceutical development, there’s something like thousand to one odds against this directly leading to a useful cure. ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/13 "2015-10-19T22:39:24Z")
> [@Rigamarole](#): > > When the OP kept going on about how he was too tired to actually bother reading the article he was posting but hoped others would explain it to him, I thought it was going to be some really long, in-depth technical piece. > > Article length: 6 paragraphs, 235 words in total. Approximately 2nd-grade reading level. > > That sure is some heavy stuff. No wonder the OP was too tired to read it. Nope. The article’s Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score is grade 6.8. So you have to be almost half way through middle school to understand it, not grade 2. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2015, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/14 "2015-10-20T14:37:17Z")
All the article talks about is how a specific protein transports fructose into the cell. We already have glut5 inhibitors, at least in vitro. , a few seconds on Google turned up a paper from 2003 on the subject. Plus medicine has come up with so many moral panics regarding what we eat that ends up being questionable that it is hard to know what to think. Don’t eat fat, don’t eat saturated fat, don’t eat cholesterol, don’t eat salt, etc. All turned out to be questionable. Now it is sugar and fructose that are the boogeymen . I don’t want a doctor giving me questionable advice and peering into every aspect of my life just so I can live a couple extra years in my 80s. ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2015, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/15 "2015-10-20T15:45:39Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > All the article talks about is how a specific protein transports fructose into the cell. > > We already have glut5 inhibitors, at least in vitro. , a few seconds on Google turned up a paper from 2003 on the subject. > \*\* > Plus medicine has come up with so many moral panics regarding what we eat that ends up being questionable that it is hard to know what to think.\*\* Don’t eat fat, don’t eat saturated fat, don’t eat cholesterol, don’t eat salt, etc. All turned out to be questionable. Now it is sugar and fructose that are the boogeymen . I don’t want a doctor giving me questionable advice and peering into every aspect of my life just so I can live a couple extra years in my 80s. That’s not the point. The claim is that some cancers use more sugars than than normal. By “shutting the door”, you can starve the cancer. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2015, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/16 "2015-10-20T16:02:16Z")
That is relevant. Medicine and dieticians have given lots of questionable advice and now carbs are the boogeymen de jure. Particularly sugar and fructose. But credibility is questionable at this point. Also cancer cells use glycolysis as the main energy source, which requires glucose, not fructose. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2015, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/17 "2015-10-20T16:28:43Z")
Potentially-promising potential treatments for major diseases are a dime a dozen. There are at least as many of those as there are medical researchers, counting both PhDs and graduate students. But some of them look good on paper but don’t even work in vitro, some work in tissue cultures but fail in live organisms, and some work only on lab mice or maybe monkeys but fail on humans. The proportion of those _potential_ treatments that actually end up turning into _real_ treatments is probably less than a percent, and even among those lucky few, most don’t work as well as it was hoped they would. Plus it takes a decade or more to even learn that. ---
**Author:** ![lazybratsche](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ba8739/32.png) [@lazybratsche](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lazybratsche)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2015, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-discovery-about-fructose-could-lead-to-treatments-for-cancer-obesity-and-diabetes/735143/18 "2015-10-20T16:59:42Z")
There’s not even a potential treatment here! In the new research paper being discussed, here is the entirety of the discussion of diabetes, cancer, and small molecules inhibitors of GLUT5: > [@http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v526/n7573/full/nature14909.html](#): > > The altered activity of the fructose transporter GLUT5, an isoform of the facilitated-diffusion glucose transporter family, has been linked to disorders such as type 2 diabetes and obesity. GLUT5 is also overexpressed in certain tumour cells, and inhibitors are potential drugs for these conditions. > … > GLUT activity is also associated with various diseases. For instance, increased GLUT5 expression has been linked to several metabolic disorders and several types of cancers such as breast cancer, because of the higher energy demand of cancer cells stimulating sugar uptake, the so-called Warburg effect. > … > Importantly, a deeper understanding of GLUT5 structure and transport mechanism, as described here, should facilitate the structure-based design of novel inhibitors with therapeutic potential. To paraphrase, “other researchers have found connections between GLUT5 and various diseases so we did a lot of detailed structural and biochemical characterization of GLUT5”. These are boilerplate statements in all biomedical research.